Recent trends in data driven applications have encouraged expanding
location awareness to indoors. Various attributes driven by location data
indoors require large scale deployment that could expand beyond specific
venue to a city, country or even global coverage. Social media, assets or
personnel tracking, marketing or advertising are examples of applications
that heavily utilise location attributes. Various solutions suggest
triangulation between WiFi access points to obtain location attribution
indoors imitating the GPS accurate estimation through satellites
constellations. However, locating signal sources deep indoors introduces
various challenges that cannot be addressed via the traditional war-driving
or war-walking methods.
This research sets out to address the problem of locating WiFi signal
sources deep indoors in unsupervised deployment, without previous
training or calibration. To achieve this, we developed a grid approach to
mitigate for none line of site (NLoS) conditions by clustering signal readings
into multi-hypothesis Gaussians distributions. We have also employed
hypothesis testing classification to estimate signal attenuation through
unknown layouts to remove dependencies on indoor maps availability.
Furthermore, we introduced novel methods for locating signal sources
deep indoors and presented the concept of WiFi access point (WAP)
temporal profiles as an adaptive radio-map with global coverage.
Nevertheless, the primary contribution of this research appears in
utilisation of data streaming, creation and maintenance of self-organising
networks of WAPs through an adaptive deployment of mass-spring
relaxation algorithm. In addition, complementary database utilisation
components such as error estimation, position estimation and expanding to
3D have been discussed. To justify the outcome of this research, we
present results for testing the proposed system on large scale dataset
covering various indoor environments in different parts of the world.
Finally, we propose scalable indoor positioning system based on received
signal strength (RSSI) measurements of WiFi access points to resolve the
indoor positioning challenge. To enable the adoption of the proposed
solution to global scale, we deployed a piece of software on multitude of
smartphone devices to collect data occasionally without the context of
venue, environment or custom hardware. To conclude, this thesis provides
learning for novel adaptive crowd-sourcing system that automatically deals
with tolerance of imprecise data when locating signal sources.